Shut up, okay? I love Dynasty Warriors 7: Empires

“All you do is press square.” “The acting is ridiculous.” “Those weapons are unrealistic.” “This is hardly strategic.” Oh, piss off, would you? I’m having a nice time.

Next time Omega Force make a game in the Warriors franchise (or Musou, to give it its much more inclusive Japanese name), I would like them to use a new engine. Ever since they rolled back the fog of war which accompanied the PS2 games the series has suffered from terrible popup. In 2013 I ought to be able to smack my 1,300th peon and not find 15 more appear around him from out of nowhere.

My lord, I propose the following strategy: let’s kick the shit out of them. Set some bases on fire, cause a few rockslides, summon some god damned tigers up in their shizzle. Really mess things up.

That’s pretty much the end of my complaints with the studio’s output. The Warriors formula is tried and tested and still pretty good. I know you don’t like it. I know all the reasons you don’t like it. I don’t actually care. I don’t like Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, or Civilization 5, or or Halo 4, or – you know what actually this is quite a long list. Anyway, the point is, I have strong subjective opinions about those games that make me disinclined to play them for long enough to overcome whatever objections I have to them (although in the case of Civilization 5 apparently 60 or so hours is not long enough) but I know that you like them and I am okay with that.

So be okay with me liking Dynasty Warriors 7: Empires.

When I am done making yet another attempt to See Every Single Thing in Skyrim, taking a blubbering wander through the final chapters of BioShock Infinite, emerging victorious after six gazillion rounds of FTL, or getting owned (again) in a raid in The Secret World, I never have to put up with some wanker popping up in my friends list to tell me how crap the game I’m playing is. But whenever I publicly confess to liking pretty much everything Omega Force has ever produced (I don’t even call them by name any more, I just say “conquering China”, “conquering Japan” or “conquering everything”), suddenly I get all these questions about whether I’m a “casual” gamer or something.

MFW a new Warriors game comes out and Pat says I can write about it if I want to so I have an excuse to spend a whole week doing nothing else.

There are a lot of things I really like about the latest Omega Force release to grace my mailbox. It uses a combat system which I enjoy very much: hacking down literal legions of sword-fodder with dozens of characters, each of whom have different move-sets if you only spend a few minutes checking them out. Facing down officers who know how to block and suddenly having to make use of an entirely different range of commands. Turning the difficulty up so I have to think about cancels and counters; turning the difficulty down so I can just rampage through the battlefield like the literal god I am.

I like starting out as an unsigned officer and spending years finding the right ruler, only to be outranked by everyone around me and having to struggle to catch up. I like starting off as a ruler and butting heads with other factions as Three Kingdoms history is tossed completely out the window due to my mad expansionist empire. I like picking a virtuous lord, rising through the ranks, then marrying his daughter, swearing oaths of fellowship with his officers, and usurping his kingdom – before getting completely confused by all the possibilities at my fingertips.

Woah, have you read this one about Wei Yan and Jiang Wei? Is that even physically possible? Hot.

I like that I can summon a bear and ride around on it. I like that my horse’s mane is on fire. I like that other people’s edit officers turn up in my game, with their ridiculous outfits and names. (Hello, “Hit Ler”; that’s subtle. I see you have 4,000 Evil Fame points.) I like that one of my own edit characters wears a school uniform and carries a sword four times the size of herself (“that’s so unrealistic,” you scoff – so unlike our modern military sims) and another one is an enormously large man who hits his foes with a fan. I like that Omega Force’s gentle embrace of a certain kind of fan – a growing demographic on both sides of the pond – means I can write a lot of furious slash fiction about men in abnormally tight shirts.

When I was a kid, I once scorned my mum because she wanted to watch an Australian rural police drama called Blue Heelers. “It doesn’t teach you anything. It’s got no artistic merit,” I said, with all the arrogance of a 14 year-old wannabe drama major. “It’s fun and I like it, don’t be such a snob,” my mum said.

Dynasty Warriors 7: Empires is fun and I like it. Don’t be such a snob.

Dynasty Warriors 7: Empires is a standalone expansion to Dynasty Warriors 7. It is exclusive to PlayStation 3.